When the Vision Keeps Shifting
How to Lead when Nothing Stays Still
You know Debbie Downer. She showed up at the happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney World, and managed to work feline AIDS and mad cow disease into a family breakfast. The sad trombone played. Everyone grimaced. But she wasn’t wrong. The problems she was describing are real, but who wants to hear that when they’re on vacation?
If you are a middle manager working under a visionary leader, you know exactly how Debbie Downer felt. You are the one in the room asking “but how are we going to do that?” while everyone else is already mentally ordering the balloons for the launch party. You are the one tracking the deadline, the budget, and the team’s increasingly thin patience while your boss is already three pivots ahead, fully convinced the new direction is even better than the last one.
And somewhere along the way, the message you’ve absorbed is that your need for a plan is a personality flaw.
It isn’t.
In emotional intelligence terms, what your visionary leader has in abundance is Optimism, the ability to see the future as bright, possible, and essentially already done. It’s a genuine strength. Organizations need people who can see what isn’t yet real and believe in it anyway. But Optimism without its counterpart, Reality Testing, the ability to see the world as it actually is right now, is a ship with no navigation system. It looks great leaving the harbor. It’s the rocks you have to worry about.
And guess who’s been quietly doing the navigating?
You.
The problem isn’t your visionary leader’s Optimism. The problem is what happens to you and your team when Point B keeps moving and no one seems to notice the cost.
Here’s what that actually looks like in practice. The team works for three weeks on a project. Leadership has a new idea. Point B moves. The team regroups, recalibrates, rebuilds. Four weeks in, Point B moves again. Nobody says it out loud, but everyone feels the fatigue that comes from putting your best work into something that’s going to get redirected anyway. Eventually, the team stops bringing their best. Why would they? They’ve learned that effort and outcome are not reliably connected. Researchers call this learned helplessness. Your team might just call it Tuesday.
Falling Into the Optimism Gap
When Point B keeps moving, something happens beneath the surface that has nothing to do with project management. The recalibrating, the rebuilding, the redirecting doesn’t just exhaust you. It starts to feel like evidence. Evidence that you aren’t good enough. That a more competent manager would have anticipated the pivot. That if you were really on top of things, the chaos wouldn’t land so hard.
That voice collecting evidence against you has a name. In Positive Intelligence, the coaching framework developed by Shirzad Chamine, it’s called the Judge. The Judge is the internalized critic that takes the raw material of a hard situation and spins it into a verdict about your worth. It’s fast, it’s convincing, and it is almost always working with bad data.
When your visionary leader pivots for the third time in six weeks, the Judge doesn’t say “that’s an organizational pattern worth naming.” It says: “If you were better at your job, you wouldn’t have to keep starting over.”
Let that land for a second.
You are absorbing the cost of someone else’s Optimism gap between what they enthusiastically believe is possible and what is actually, structurally, humanly doable, and your Judge is handing you the bill as if you wrote it.
This is the move that keeps middle managers stuck. Not the chaos itself, but the story the Judge tells about what the chaos means about you. As long as you believe that story, you will keep working harder to compensate for a problem that was never yours to solve.
The first step in silencing the Judge is simply noticing it. Not arguing with it or trying to ignore it, just recognizing its voice for what it is. A thought. Not a fact. Not a verdict. Just a very loud, very persuasive thought.
And once you can hear the Judge for what it is, something else becomes possible: you can start to hear the truth it’s been drowning out. That truth is found through Reality Testing.
The Other Lane
Let’s talk about what Reality Testing actually is, because chances are you’ve never heard it described as a strength. In the EQ-i 2.0 framework, Reality Testing is the ability to see the world as it actually is, to recognize when emotions, enthusiasm, or wishful thinking are coloring your perception of what’s true right now. It’s the internal voice that asks: is this actually working, or do I just want it to be working?
In a culture that celebrates vision and punishes hesitation, Reality Testing gets a bad reputation. It looks like resistance. It sounds like negativity. It gets a sad trombone and a grimace from everyone at the table.
But here is what Reality Testing actually is in practice: it is the skill that keeps the ship from hitting the rocks. It is the function that protects the organization’s resources: the time, the budget, the goodwill of a team that has been asked to rebuild for the fourth time. It is not the opposite of Optimism. It is the thing that makes Optimism useful.
Your visionary leader needs you. They may not know that yet, but they do.
This is the reframe that matters: your lane and your leader’s lane are not in conflict. They are complementary. His lane is the vision, the “what if,” the belief that something great is coming. Your lane is the execution, the team’s capacity, the structural integrity, the honest read on where things actually stand. Both lanes are necessary. The organization stalls without the vision. It crashes without the reality check.
The problem isn’t that you’re in different lanes. The problem is that nobody has named it that way. So instead of functioning as complementary forces, you’ve been quietly doing your job while absorbing the message that your job is the problem.
It isn’t. Your need for clarity is not a personality flaw or a failure of flexibility. It is a legitimate, valuable, organizational function, and it is time to start treating it like one.
Two Tools for the Middle
Knowing that your Reality Testing is a gift doesn’t make the moment any easier when Point B starts moving in real time. You’re sitting in the meeting, your leader’s eyes are lit up with the new direction, and you can feel the familiar cocktail of frustration, resignation, and Judge commentary rising up before you’ve even had a chance to process what just changed.
This is where the work gets practical.
In the Moment: The PQ Rep
Positive Intelligence uses the term “PQ Rep” to describe a brief, intentional practice of redirecting your attention to your senses (what you can feel, hear, or touch right now) for about thirty seconds or the length of a couple of deep breaths. It sounds almost insultingly simple. It isn’t.
When the Judge activates, it pulls you out of the present and into a story about your competence, about your leader’s dysfunction, or about how this is never going to change. The PQ Rep doesn’t argue with that story. It just interrupts it long enough to give you back your footing.
In practice, this might look like pressing your fingertips together under the table and focusing on the sensation of pressure. Or taking one slow breath and actually noticing the air moving. Or feeling the weight of your feet on the floor. Thirty seconds. That’s it. Not to suppress the frustration but to keep the Judge from driving the next thing that comes out of your mouth.
Because what comes next matters.
After the Moment: The Alignment Question
Most middle managers in this situation reach for one of two responses. The first is the handbrake: “We can’t do that, we’re already three weeks into the current plan.” Accurate. Completely ineffective. The second is silence that leads to absorbing the pivot, nodding along, and going back to the team with yet another redirect and no explanation. Neither of these serves you, your team, or your leader.
The third option is what we’ll call the Alignment Question. Instead of a handbrake or silence, you offer a question that moves the conversation forward while doing the work of Reality Testing out loud:
“I want this vision to be a reality. Here is where we are on the current path. How does this new direction align with our core mission, and what do you need us to stop doing to make room for it?”
Read that again. Notice what it does. It opens with alignment, not resistance. It states the current reality clearly and without apology. And then it asks the leader to do the work of Reality Testing with you by naming what gets deprioritized when something new gets added. That last piece is the most important. You are not asking permission to push back. You are inviting your leader to be a partner in the very function they’ve been leaving entirely to you.
This is not a soft move. It is a high-level EQ negotiation, and it reframes your need for clarity as a service to the organization rather than an obstacle to the vision.
Reflect and Act
You have been doing two jobs. Your own — the execution, the team management, the structural thinking, the reality checks that keep the organization from flying off the rails. And someone else’s — absorbing the emotional and organizational cost of an Optimism gap that was never yours to carry. That second job is optional even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.
The Judge will tell you that the chaos is evidence of your inadequacy. Reality Testing will tell you something different: that you have been functioning as the navigator on a ship where the pilot keeps changing the destination, and you have been doing it well. The exhaustion you feel is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you have been carrying more than your share for a long time.
That is worth naming. And then it is worth putting down.
Reflect: Think about the last time a shifting target made you question your own competence. What was the Judge telling you? Write down the actual words, as specifically as you can. Now ask yourself: is that a fact, or is it a story the Judge built from someone else’s chaos?
Act: The next time Point B moves, try the Alignment Question before you leave the room. Just once. Write down what happens: what you asked, how your leader responded, and what it felt like to name the reality out loud instead of absorbing it silently.